


And God Shall Meet Him In The Night

by MJ (mjr91)



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Non-Canon Relationship, Old Friends, Possible AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-16
Updated: 2013-11-16
Packaged: 2018-01-01 16:59:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1046296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mjr91/pseuds/MJ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What didn't Raymond Reddington want Sam to tell Lizzie?  If it's not that Raymond Reddington is her biological father, what else could it be?  Pure speculation based on the eternal LBD potential of this show and how well it fits in the same universe as SHIELD.  Spoilers (including some exact dialogue) for Blacklist S1x08.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And God Shall Meet Him In The Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kyrdwyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrdwyn/gifts).



> Written when The Blacklist still has yet to establish just how Red and Lizzie are connected, but I'm part of the large camp that says "not her father". Since I'm amused by how easily The Blacklist and Agents of SHIELD work together, I decided to toss a completely different idea into the mix. Why would Red want to hide what appears to be a truth about Lizzie's parentage? Here's a possible different take.
> 
> Title from "The Gates of Damascus" by Flecker, quoted in part at the end. If you've read enough Agatha Christie, you've read excerpts from it in several places, including at least one book title (Postern of Fate).

Her name was Kirsten Aangestad, but no one called her that. Someone remembered that the great operatic soprano Jenny Lind had been known as the Swedish Nightingale, and had mentioned the point, since Kirsten was Swedish. "But I don't sing," she'd protested. That was all right, came the response – the throwing knives she kept on her person, usually in a holster up her sleeve, sang in the wind when she threw them; they'd all heard it when they watched her training routines. And so Kirsten Aangestad became Nightingale, and one of SHIELD's top agents. She'd had a ceramic throwing blade designed for her, one that passed easily through metal detectors, and so she'd been invaluable in undercover work, since she could get through any airport, her long light brown mane usually transformed into a tight bun, her figure hidden under baggy sweaters that concealed the arsenal strapped to her body.

While SHIELD disapproved of fraternization, a certain amount of it was unavoidable. That was especially true among field agents, whose work was often so classified that no one outside of SHIELD was a safe partner in a relationship – how to explain why you were away so often, and for so long, and how you came back so bruised and battered? And so SHIELD turned a blind eye to fraternization when it could – with the one proviso that no field agent could be married or raising a family. 

Kirsten Aangestad might have been Nightingale, but she was also human. Falling in love was not beyond her, and falling in love with another field agent, Phil Coulson, was simplicity itself. When she discovered that she was pregnant, she had no compunction disappointing SHIELD's highest echelons by requesting a desk job. She wouldn't marry Phil – she might remove herself from the field, but Phil was born to it. They still saw each other, regularly, though the upper echelons were irritated that he was a father – but as long as Kirsten raised their daughter herself, and he was not parenting the child regularly, so be it.

Nightingale had barely been scratched even once on the job. It was ironic that Kirsten Aangestad, on the other hand, failed to dodge a speeding taxi on Lexington Avenue one Saturday while she was shopping.

Phil Coulson had two options – raise his daughter, or stay in the field. And the top brass made their opinion known. He wasn't leaving SHIELD any time soon, and no desk chair had his name on it. What to do with a four-year-old child was to not have one. Forced into a no-choice situation, he did the only thing he could do – he made a phone call to an old friend.

* * *

In the Afghan desert, missions went bad. This one had been no exception. Of the seven men on the team, of mixed branches of service and ranks, three were left. They stood in a cluster of rocks, amid the mingling blood of their four comrades and nearly a dozen of the enemy. One Army Ranger, one naval commander, and a Marine lowered their weapons and stared at each other nearly uncomprehendingly. Finally the commander, the only surviving officer, tossed his gun to the side and threw an arm around each of the other two. "Cheese? Sam? Goddamn it to hell, we're alive. It may not seem like much right now, but once you're done pissing your pants, now that it's over – we're alive."

Sam, the Marine, looked the commander in the eye. "We wouldn't be without you, sir. Nice work there."

"No better than yours, Sam – and Cheese, I may be forced to admit that a Ranger is almost half the man a SEAL is after what you just did. When we get out of this shithole, I'm notifying your commanders to put you in for commendations, both of you."

"Just doing my job," Cheese sighed, exhausted. "We all saved each other. That's what it's about."

"I owe you guys my life," Sam grumbled. "Anything either of you ever needs, I'm good for it."

"Same here," Cheese echoed.

"Agreed," their leader confirmed.

In the desert heat, their own blood and their comrades' on their hands and faces, they joined hands. They knelt over Dave, one of their fallen, their hands together on top of his body. No juvenile blood brothers formed by shaking hands with mutually cut palms, but brothers made by the blood of their brothers in arms, the three swore faithfully that whatever either of the others needed – food, shelter, money, comfort – they would be there for each other under any circumstances. Nothing would stop them, nothing would prevent them from carrying out their charge to each other.

And so it was that Phil Coulson, former Army Ranger, now an agent of SHIELD, found himself handing a young girl to Captain Raymond Reddington, USN, to deliver to one Samuel Scott, USMC, now back home in Nebraska, whispering the words, "Tell Sam to take care of Lizzie."

* * *

The back story had been created carefully, laboriously. Elizabeth Aangestad Coulson, now Lizzie Scott, could never know that she was the daughter of two of SHIELD's finest agents, adopted by one of their closest friends through the machinations of another. Easier to generate a tale of abandonment by a no-good father, and a deceased mother (that part was true enough, though not in identity), than to lead her in any way to SHIELD. Reddington's intelligence contacts, wooed with the story of saving a child in need, and possibly getting in the good graces of someone at SHIELD, had been only too happy to generate the documents she needed to be the child of two other parents than her own, so that she could be adopted by Sam Scott.

And yet, blood would out. The daughter of Nightingale and Phil Coulson was herself as clever as her biological father, as graceful as her mother, and as drawn to law enforcement in her own way. She'd studied psychology as a means to an end, to joining the FBI as an agent. She was accounted brilliant, a natural profiler.

And the man who'd sworn to Phil Coulson that he'd do anything Coulson needed, who'd sworn to see that Lizzie Coulson was safely delivered to their friend who'd immediately agreed to raise her, a man who'd wound up deserting the military, abandoning his country, and becoming an international criminal, found it later in his power to help advance Elizabeth Scott Keen's FBI career while turning it to his own advantage. It seemed a natural thing to do for both of his friends.

Raymond Reddington might have abandoned patriotism, might have abandoned the straight and narrow, might have thrown morality as far out the window as it could go. But one thing he never did was go back on a promise to a friend. In his youth, in the military, and in his criminal dealings, one thing had been sacred to him, and had kept him alive. Raymond Reddington was as good as his word. And his word to Sam and to Cheese, given the day they'd all lived, meant more than any other. He'd lived by it, though he'd rarely called upon it, and the others had as well.

* * *

"You gave her an incredible gift, Sam. Taking her in, loving her as your own."

"I need to tell Lizzie." Sam Scott lay in his incredibly uncomfortable hospital bed, morphine in his IV drip doing nothing to relieve the discomfort it created. He was looking Raymond Reddington in the face. They hadn't seen each other in several years; unfortunately, both knew this meeting in Sam's room was almost certainly their last.

"No." Reddington was firm. Lizzie Keen didn't need to know about SHIELD, not yet. She didn't need to have the burden of being Nightingale's daughter thrust on her. And even if she could take that, on top of everything else in her life then, there was Phil to consider – Phil, who Sam wasn't thinking about, obviously.

"I know what we agreed, but before I go, I have to tell her."

"I can't let you do that." Only Phil could agree to that, and Phil wasn't there. Phil was off somewhere on his flying arsenal, tracking down a missing superhero or supervillain of some sort. He'd mentioned something about surfing? A surfer, was it? It had been a rather vague message, but with Phil's work, that was expected, especially when he was talking to his very close friend who was the man most likely to supply SHIELD's enemies with exactly what they needed to take down SHIELD agents.

"She deserves the truth." Perhaps so, but not under those circumstances, Reddington thought. He'd get it across to Sam. His specialty – what Phil joked was Reddington's super power – was being persuasive.

And by the time Sam made what both he and Reddington knew was his last call to his daughter, Sam had realized that Reddington was right. He'd forgotten Phil, and it was Phil who'd made Lizzie Sam's daughter. He owed Phil, and he owed Phil the secrecy that they'd all promised.

* * *

"You look like hell." That was Raymond Reddington's stock greeting to many of his friends. But in Sam Scott's case, it was the bitter truth. Scott had survived with Reddington and with Phil Coulson, that day in Afghanistan, but cancer had laid the Marine low. It had done so once before – Phil had been able to visit that time, and more than once – but now it was coming in with reinforcements, determined to do the job.

"They've given me six weeks. For what? So I can lay here and watch them taking me apart? I wish they'd said six hours." The line was, perhaps, intended to sound amusing, but Sam Scott's face and body language betrayed its seriousness. It was time; perhaps it was past time. And he knew it. The only thing blocking him from peace was the miracle of modern medicine, forcing him to be alive against his will, too weak to stop anyone from keeping his existence prolonged past his endurance.

Reddington knew it as well as Sam did. And Raymond Reddington had made a promise to Sam Scott those decades before, in that rock outcropping, standing with Sam in their friends' blood.

Raymond Reddington was a man who kept his promises.

* * *

"I love you, too, butterball." Sam clicked off the phone wearily as Reddington left from perusing the hospital parking lot through the window to take the phone from his friend. He sat at the side of the bed, watching pain and exhaustion coursing through Sam's body, and lowered himself to bring his face close to the man he'd survived with once before.

"You will always be her father, Sam. I can only hope to love her and protect her as you have."

At the words, Sam Scott wrinkled his face – not in anger or rejection, but in pain and in acceptance. Reddington nodded slightly.

He'd killed any number of men – in the military, in his criminal career. He'd killed in self-defense, he'd killed to defend others, and he'd killed to protect his investments. Never had he flinched – he'd been trained not to, by Uncle Sam's tax dollars. Whether at a distance, with a gun, with a bomb, or with his hands, he knew what to do and how to do it, and how to detach from the act.

This time, it was different. It was what Sam wanted, what he'd danced around with Reddington just before he'd called Lizzie to tell her that he loved her. Sam was ready to go, and he trusted Reddington to get it over and done with, then and there. Tired of waiting, tired of not living, it was past time for what the doctors refused to allow.

And it was the hardest killing that Raymond Reddington had ever done.

He placed the pillow back under Sam's head, as if it mattered as much as to hide his use of it. A sudden death wouldn't be unexpected in Sam's case; they'd never bother to autopsy, never look for the telltale capillary bruising on the face that said suffocation. But it also seemed only respectful to his friend to see to his comfort even in this last gesture.

He fixed Sam's hair gently before leaning back down to kiss the not-yet-cold forehead in farewell. Sam's face was lined and tired even in this final repose, death not releasing the body's musculature from the grips of the pain it had endured. He pressed his face against Sam's for a moment, holding back the tears that threatened to come out from behind his eyes – Raymond Reddington was not a man that cried, even if it were justifiable.

He rose and straightened his jacket. He'd miss Sam. He'd tell everything to Phil Coulson, as soon as Phil was back. And Phil would agree, and would understand. But he'd not tell Lizzie Keen, though he'd let his charge talk to him about her father as much as she needed. It would make them both feel better for her to remember Sam to him.

Because he had promised Phil and Sam all those years ago in the desert. And Raymond Reddington always kept his promises.

* * *

And one who licks his lips for thirst with fevered eye shall face in fear  
The palms that wave, the streams that burst, his last mirage, O Caravan!  
And one – the bird-voiced Singing man – shall fall behind thee, Caravan!  
And God shall meet him in the night, and he shall sing as best he can.

And one the Bedouin shall slay, and one, sand-stricken on the way  
Go dark and blind; and one shall say – "How lonely is the Caravan!"  
Pass out beneath, O Caravan, Doom's Caravan, Death's Caravan!  
I had not told ye, fools, so much, save that I heard your Singing-man.

(from The Gates of Damascus, James Elroy Flecker)


End file.
